Does M+ Hurt Raiding: A Discussion

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
137

My impression of season 1 was that any talk about M+ got overshadowed by the whole debacle with conquest gear being the best for everything.

I dunno what Blizzard’s problem is, these days. They used to have this figured out because PvP gear was generally not as good for PvE (because resilience wasn’t great for most characters), and PvE gear was generally not as good for PvP (because it didn’t have resilience).

But they sure seem to get a kick of out fixing a problem, and then throwing out all their work afterwards.

138

Conquest wasn’t really relevant around time 9.0.5 was happening, and also at the very least that all ties in to how M+ loot and Vault works after all. Conquest may not have been the way it was if Raid/M+ had been different at launch (and of course the ilvl/PvPilvl thing).

Most of the discussions I can recall about “prestige” rewards in M+, or the Vault caps, or Valor, had pretty much nothing to do with COnquest, and entirely about M+ as a standalone.

139

I thought the differing PvP ilvls for PvE was a more recent thing this expansion?

Meaning it was season 2 (or 3?). I know they’d done it in prior expansions.

140

Pretty sure it was either 9.1 or 9.1.5, and done as a way to help out Honor gear compete for those who were starting out in PvP? I just mentioned it since it’s something that would theoretically have changed the dynamics if it had been a thing at launch (since presumably PvP gear wouldn’t have competed nearly as well in PvE).

Like, I’m forgetting what the actual ivlls were, but I think unranked Conquest was 200, and it scaled up to 226 as Duelist? I’d presume that if differing ilvls had been in at launch, unranked Conquest might have been something like 187 (scales to 200 in PvP), with Duelist being 213 (scales to 226 in PvP). Or something like that.

141

This assumes both that the problem is real and the solutions are good. You’ve done nothing to demonstrate either. You lack the prerequisite ability to think critically as evidenced by you simply pointing to a perceived issue (most of your gear comes from non raiding) and drawing conclusions from there.

You suggested nothing to make raiding better, just that the loot disparity be addressed. If you had said something along the lines of:

  1. change raid sizes
  2. reduce the number of precision mechanics
  3. work on the overall playability of raiding
  4. add things into the game to teach players so there aren’t so many bads running around (making recruiting easier)

You get no push back from anyone. You’d kill the game to save raiding. Most of us would prefer to keep playing and having fun. Mythic plus players are far stickier and more profitable for blizzard to design around. Much like those who farm transmog and other super casual stuff, which is why every patch adds 50 mounts, 30 armor items and 20 unique battle pets.

2 Likes
142

I did, actually:

And I post about it quite frequently. Maybe I should just copy-paste a magnum opus in every thread. Anyway, here are some tidbits:

There’s just so much that needs fixing. Gearing, great vault, skips, extends, boss length, spreadsheet bosses, trash, raid sizes… it’s getting close to being darn near everything, at this point.

/sigh

143

Considering Aotc and KSM have close to equal % completion and are relatively similar in difficulty (Aotc probably a little harder) maybe Blizz should just cap gear there.

265/272 max.

Keys > 15 and mythic raids are for cosmetics.

Blizzard realized for mythic+ having high difficulties reward power is dumb, maybe they should come to their senses about that for raiding.

Then mythic can focus on progression and kills and extending is a non-issue since there is no power to be had on reclears.

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144

When your solution is that raiding should offer a higher ilvl than m+ (especially when it already does), then yes, an m+ player is going to chime in. I don’t want raiding to be terrible. Making it offer a more noticeably higher ilvl would make it terrible though. That would incentivize people who don’t want to raid to raid in order to be competitive with the type of content they want to do so you’d end up with a group of people who don’t want to be there. Our community is toxic enough, don’t you think? Right now as far as pve is concerned, m+ is the best way to get farmable gear with the stats you want under heroic ilvl, and once the valor cap is lifted it’s the best way to get farmable gear under mythic ilvl. Raiding still offers a higher ilvl and a potential of more high ilvl drops per week if you’re running with a static group. This is why most hardcore mythic raiders are going to be geared up faster than you or I will.

And as for the 285’s for the first 2 bosses, they lifted the lock for bosses killed this tier. You can get loot from the Jailer without having CE, it’s just luck of the draw.

145

You almost got there.

The issue is raiding is a “massive chore” that needs to be worked on. But you dont need to harm other aspects of the game like m+ to do it. What we really see is butt hurt raiders upset that people can do other content and get equal or better gear from it. And we have seen these same people flip out since forever with this issue.

146

I think the biggest issue is the difficulty to reward ratio is WAY off.

Blizz tried to offset this by limiting the 278 from mythic+ to 1 per week to “compensate” for it basing orders of magnitude to accomplish.

147

So fix the difficulty. Drop more items in raids. Reduce the group size to allow for less coordination (and the fights accordingly). The success of other games super high end raiding comes, in part, from not requiring 20 people to be perfect for 10m. This is fixable, but you don’t have to touch anything else to do it.

1 Like
148

Apologies if I’ve told this story before. It’s still irritating and may be the thing that gets me to finally move on from wow.

The anti-guild pressure started instantly in legion with M+. I saw it happen in a dedicated normal and dedicated heroic guild who had tons of people. All the players in the normal guild were normal-good enough for M+ and the same was true of the heroic guild players.

But it’s not like there were enough tanks and heals in those groups to take care of everyone. Tanks and heals got overstrained having to put forth a raid-level effort into learning this stuff and also overstrained trying to spread themselves around and include all the dps. And god forbid if you were one of the debtor-specs (a spec that blizzard just gave the middle finger to) back then because you really got left out. Effectively something like 2/3 to 3/4 of the dps were left out of this new content ---- content that had HUGE rewards too.

Over time this created whatever you want to call it in guilds … drama, bad tidings, hurt feelings, sadness, however you want to put it. People who adapted more quickly to this new thing got more gear and did better which lead to them getting more invites and more opportunities (pos. feedback loop) and the reverse for people who didn’t get initial opportunities (neg. loop).

The normal guild died a quick death with some quitting and a couple going classic. The heroic guild made it through 2.1 xpacs of M+ before dying. But right away though, they had massive attrition from the patter of non-inclusion that’s a part of shoe-horning 5s content into guild. They quickly went from 40+ strong to 20 and then after that mid-low teens.

I saw M+ for the guild killer it was right away. Reminded me instantly of heroic dungeons in cataclysm, which debtor-specs always having a hard time. But that was low-key drama, the game and guilds could weather that. This new thing though, m+, I could tell right away it was going to be bad with how big the rewards were.

So I said screw it, I’ll just raid. And it worked with the heroic guild for a while. But then as the group evolved the people running the M+ got cockier and cockier, like jackass irritating. When I’d ask to be included the amount of elitist jackassery was astonishing. It was like they had all turned into 12yo epeen obsessed wackados. I mean, jesus, no wonder 3/4 of the guild left. Eventually though, curiosity got the better of me the last “season” of BFA. So I thought I’d take my heroic and mythic raid gear and see if I could pug my way to 15s and 20+ 5s content. Finally check this thing out.

I did and boy it did not go well for the heroic guild. In the course of 2 xpacs of M+ they had developed this identity for themselves as too-cool edgelords and I guess in their heads they just kept me around to fill a spot. When I started doing keys as high as they were (or higher) it kind of shattered their identity. They actually lost interest in doing runs because of it, that what they thought reality was maybe wasn’t. And the heroic guild collapsed next raid tier. A guild that raided MC and played beta.

Anyway, so what right? As the game changes so does the player population makeup right? Change is good, revitalizes the game, yada yada yada.

Well here’s what. This new population brought to us by elevated 5s content. They aren’t loyal. Warcraft isn’t the only game in town anymore and when they don’t like what they see they are poof gone. Sure they’ll come back once in a while but they are more than likely gone again after that.

What was before — all types of guilds supported by raid focus, big group content. Those groups had a giant array of interpersonal interactions from friendship to mild irritation which act like multipliers for the game. The most compelling thing in the game will always be people. That doesn’t mean the game quality doesn’t matter, high quality has to be assumed. But after that it’s the people and everything that goes along with it which cements things. Raid is big group, more people, more stuff. More glue, more nostalgia, etc. Raid is guild and guild is raid. By comparison, 5s content just doesn’t do that. Less people, less interactions, less loyalty, less nostalgia, etc etc etc.

anyway, whatever, 5s suck.

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149

I should say — m+ was a novel idea (at least novel to me, could have been ripped from somewhere) applied to content that had been really well worked on and polished but was very under utilized. It was, a great idea. Where it has fallen flat on the face is the ridiculously elevated loot and game rewards and hyper focus from devs, business people, and the money guys. Like m+ was the 2nd coming or something.

150

Heroic is already similar in difficulty to KSM level keys.

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151

No one cares about heroic. We were talking about Mythic.

152

Well that’s part of it, +15s which are easier than heroic giving mythic level gear every week.

Making mythic easier to be more aligned doesn’t make sense because heroic is already harder than 15s.

And mythic is a massive leap over heroic.

Make 278 gear be from 22s or so then it will be more of a choice and not a chore.

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153

Remove gear entirely from the discussion. Just fix the amount of headache Mythic difficulty is and people will stop feeling shafted. I’ll never Stan 15s because it is the participation trophy of WoW. But it has the same relevance to key pushing Heroic Raid has to raiding so there is that.

154

That still doesn’t work. Heroic is already harder than 15s for worse gear. Making mythic easier without changing anything else doesn’t do anything.

My vote is cap gear at 265/272 and make mythic entirely for cosmetics.

It’s even funnier that Blizzard didn’t even update the score required to upgrade gear to 272. It’s still 2000 which is doing 10s, to upgrade gear to heroic jailer level.

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155

Just put mythic as an option in group finder problem solved. Why do people always have to wait mid tier to play the game?

156

There’s more to reducing the Mythic headache then just making it easier.

such as this. This doesn’t do anything to the difficulty, but opens up the group flexibility. You could remove the hard lockouts as well. I don’t do raiding. Nothing proposed would solve that for me, but people stress way too hard about ilvl. The top key runners are mythic raiders (for the most part). You can only be competitive by doing everything.